OLD REPORTAGE (from 1960s): Fred Alger is one of Wall Street's stars with two hundred million dollars of investors' money to play with.
FRED ALGER: It's an intensely competitive business. You have to really like competition, which I do like.
HAL LIEBES: Alger was founded in 1964 by Fred Alger. Fred believed that investing in companies undergoing positive dynamic change were the best companies for clients to own. Fred believed that doing your own research to discover those companies was more likely to give you a differentiated view on the companies that you were going to invest in.
KEVIN COLLINS: By the time I got to Wall Street there were a number of well-established growth boutiques. A lot of them have gone out of business. It's a testimony to Alger that we've been able to last for 60 years. I’m in my 28th year.
DAN CHUNG: Our longevity as a firm is also part of having a strong culture. Right? Having a strong process. A firm having a character that’s indelible in its DNA.
HAL: Portfolio managers and analysts are referred to often as the kings and queens of the investment process. I like to think of those individuals as the vital organs in the body Alger.
DAN: Analysts, again, at Alger are charged with being sector experts, knowing their industry as well as an expert in the industry would. When you combine that with the pace of disruption and the scale of disruption that's happening, I think it's only experienced analysts and experienced portfolio managers who can try to discern what are going to be the trends that dominate? What are gonna be the trends that fail or end?
KEVIN: I would have to go out and find companies that would suit the Alger investment philosophy. You had to display a lot of initiative to kind of get those ideas into the portfolios, you had to gain credibility.
ANDREW GUSTIN: We're going out to trade shows. We're visiting companies. Continually thinking about the assumptions we have for what their business might look like. And we're trying to model out the trajectory of their business and their earnings and what the company might be worth.
ALLYN LIU: I’ve been working here for two years, straight out of college. I started as an equity research associate. We cover all the earnings intensively during earnings season. We work on new ideas and think about market trends and what sort of stocks could be longs or shorts between earnings, and we also conduct calls and checks.
ANDREW: And then we're continually discussing our findings and debating with one another the conclusions that we can make from them.
DAN: And so, it requires a mindset and an approach that basically is willing to handle lots of uncertainty and is able to imagine – and it is a creative job – outcomes that are both very good and very bad and not necessarily linear. Find the companies whose fundamental performance, which will ultimately be reflected in their financials is gonna be nonlinear relative to expectations.
ANDREW: I think it's important to be consistent with your process. The market can be turbulent and volatile, and you can't be reinventing yourself and trying to reposition and do something that's totally at odds with your core approach.
HAL: I love and hate product launches. Well, if you’ve ever been a fan of football, I like to think of the operations group as the placekicker. And the job of the placekicker is to make the field goal or fail. And in that role, you very rarely get the chance to win the game.
TINA PAYNE: I head the legal and compliance department. I’ve been here for seven years. Legal and compliance is so important at Alger because, next to investments, it’s the cornerstone of the firm. It's what keeps the lights on. The employees are trained properly in the rules and regulations. And it's also important to our clients. They want to make sure that we are compliant with the various rules and regulations, so they can put their trust in us.
HAL: Why do I love a product launch? It’s a new product. I think we're up to five or soon to be six ETFs.
TINA: I enjoy product launches. It signifies growth. It signifies that the firm is evolving and is continuing to evolve.
HAL: It's a great deal of work. It's coordinating a number of moving parts.
TINA: I'm there to say, hey, for this type of product, there are some wrinkles that we need to talk about and some other controls that we need to put in place.
HAL: And our ability to launch products is sometimes held up by just the structure of our industry.
TINA: For me, it's extremely exciting.
HAL: I think the mentoring program at Alger is extraordinary. Younger analysts at Alger get the opportunity to work directly with senior analysts and portfolio managers in a way that they would likely not get at another firm.
ANDREW: I benefited from people sitting with me, answering my questions. Getting to do that as a mentor now is one of the most satisfying parts of my job, to see people get the confidence to make stock calls and to see light bulbs go off when they understand something.
KEVIN: Ginger Risco exhibited lots of patience through the years and a lot of good teaching and mentorship and it allowed me to develop as an analyst.
DAN: David Alger himself of course was very inspirational. David cut a huge figure on Wall Street. And so, he was sort of both very senior, but still kind of also quite young at heart.
On a day-to-day basis, Sei-Lai Khoo and Ron Tartaro, in particular. Sei-Lai was really a leader of the whole research team. Ron was pretty quiet. I was lucky. I got assigned to work for him as his analyst. Ron was a great investor. He might have been the best of them all really; able to both know when something was sort of bubbling up but also not to get carried away when enthusiasm got overblown. There was a long period where I would actually think to myself what would Ron and Sei-Lai do?
ALLYN: I worked with Darryl Ah Now, a great analyst and a great boss. A lot of models get pretty deep in the weeds in terms of drivers and adjustments. So, it was a really great first experience, first experience.
HAL: Dan's best attribute is when he sits in a conference room or a meeting room with new analysts, and he will spend hours with them, teaching them the Alger Way of investing, teaching them how to build a model, what positive dynamic change is, how to have a differentiated view. It really is a treat for him, and it certainly is a great experience for an incoming analyst here at Alger.
ANDREW: I remember doing a modeling project for Dan Chung who was the senior tech analyst at that time. I was just a college kid, and I did this project on Intel's gross margin and was modeling different scenarios around their depreciation expense, and I spent a couple hours with him working through an Excel spreadsheet.
ALLYN: Dan had a special round for research associates recently where he assigned us names, and we pitched it to him. It was honestly a great experience not only to get Dan’s feedback but doing it all together in this special round with the rest of the research associates, watching my colleagues get up there and pitch their stocks. So, I really do think at Alger, you will be mentored your whole time here.
SHANNON O’CONNOR: My name is Shannon O’Connor. I am a senior vice president in the Institutional Sales group at Alger. This November will be nineteen years, so I almost can't believe that I've been here that long, but here I am.
In 2007, Dan Chung, our CEO, sent an e-mail to about 15 or so employees. And he basically said, “I want to start a little committee. I want to do more volunteer events with the firm. I kind of want our philanthropic presence to be known.” At that time, our leadership obviously are all very philanthropic people, charitable people, but that wasn't spread throughout the organization because it wasn't marketed. So, he said, we got a budget. I want you to start working on this. We were like, great. So now, I don't know, 17 years later, I am now leading the committee with the most wonderful team members ever.
ANDREW: I think that the charitable efforts really emanated from the experience of 9/11 and a desire to honor the colleagues that were lost – the Candlelight Committee was kind of formed out of that.
SHANNON: We have this beautiful memorial with 35 candles, which are dedicated to the people that we lost on 9/11. We thought that would be a great way to memorialize the employees that we lost. So now we are the Candlelight Committee.
DAN: There’s a lot of problems in the world and if people like us and companies like this one don’t do anything, we’re losing the power of the millions and millions and millions of people who are in smaller businesses. I think it’s super important, first of all, that those businesses give back to the communities that they’re in. Right?
SHANNON: The number of organizations is probably anywhere between 400 and 500 at this point. So, to just think that from that one e-mail that Dan sent on day one in 2007 to where we are today, it's just huge.
ANDREW: So, I was an intern in 2001 going into my senior year of college at Stanford, and my internship was in the World Trade Center, and I had gotten a return offer on my last day. I remember sitting in David Alger’s office with Ron Tartaro and SeiLai Khoo and so excited to get the return offer, and just a few weeks later, 9/11 happened.
KEVIN: People were, how can you recover from an event like that?
DAN: Many clients pulled money without even giving us a chance to say hey, here’s our plan to rebuild or here’s what we’re going to do. They just said sell.
KEVIN: Given the success with a lot of the people who went to new careers outside of Alger after they had been trained at Alger, the fact that they were willing to come back to Alger because they had a very strong affinity in their hearts, or they were very grateful for the opportunity that they were provided, I think that was just such a great honor to our fallen colleagues.
DAN: Most of them just dropped whatever they were doing, resigned the next day, and came back, started coming back to Alger. So, with a core of experienced Alger trained people, coming back as alumni to help rebuild the firm as Alger. A lot of it was just honoring people at the firm that we had lost together. And so, that became sort of our driving mission.
ANDREW: I ended up coming back the following year after I graduated. It was great to be back and trying to help Alger move forward. On some level, I wanted to be part of the effort to keep the firm going.
DAN: I was driven more by not the idea of stay in business, but continue the legacy of great performance, continue the legacy of a culture around stock picking and investing, honor the people that we lost who had given so much of their lives to their work, and had built the place, not just David, but every single one of the other colleagues.
ANDREW: To this day a big part of my feelings about Alger stem from the fact that it started at that time with those people, and I think about those people all the time.
HAL: We've had some clients at Alger for well over twenty years, and I think that speaks to the consistency of our investment process and philosophy.
KEVIN: Client relationships are so important to Alger. They're important in good times and in bad times. All the good clients that we had that expressed the faith in Alger, the ability to rebuild post 9/11, we're forever grateful to them. Without that lifeblood, without their trust we wouldn't be who we are today.
Money is an emotional topic, and oftentimes those emotions can distort behavior, and I think that happens at a personal level. I also think it happens at a professional level.
PATRICK KELLY: I remember I was told by one of our former portfolio managers, Selai Khoo, that managing money for others is a great responsibility. It’s a responsibility that I take very seriously. We manage all kinds of different money for people. Some of it’s individual. Some of its institution. So it is a huge responsibility, and I want to be dependable for the people that have entrusted us with their money.
KEVIN: Our portfolio managers, our analysts, they know that beyond the account numbers, they're real people's lives, real people's hopes, aspirations and needs, and so it's a big job for us to be managing this capital, and it's one that we take seriously day after day after day.
HAL: Just about everything keeps me up at night, and that is just the nature of the job.
DAN: I guess I have a well above average capacity to handle stress, and it’s partially because I don't perceive some of this as stress. I perceive it actually as relatively fun.
ANKUR CRAWFORD: We might be small, but we are mighty in terms of our competitive dynamic. And you really have to fight in this market. It's not easy but we’re driven to win for our clients.
AMY ZHANG: This is a business that I feel like we can always do better. So, it’s that continuous drive to do better. To be continuously learning things and expand our intellectual capacity. For me, it’s very exciting.
DAN: You get to participate in and meet some of the most important people in business, the innovators, the disruptors. You pretty much have a front row seat. As an analyst or a portfolio manager, you have a front row seat at hundreds of companies and their paths.
PATRICK: This is a very humbling business, so you can't get carried away with celebrating success. I think I've always tried to walk very humbly as a person and tried to walk very humbly before the markets. I think I was that way 25 years ago. That's the way I still am today. It drives you to work harder and push harder to achieve success.
SHANNON: There are friendships that I've made at this firm that have been almost my full 20 years. So, I just think it was a wonderful place for me to grow and still is a wonderful place for me to grow.
TINA: My most favorite aspects of working at Alger over the past seven years are definitely the people. I think the people make the firm.
ALLYN: Dan Chung started in the early 2000s, I believe, as the CEO of this company, and before that he was an analyst and a research associate here, and there's a huge culture of having people join young and stay until they're old, and I believe that's going to continue. I am enthusiastic about the future of Alger.
DAN: We’re in our 60th year because the philosophy works so well. And it works so well because it’s not a set of rules or formulas. It’s a philosophy of how to look at the real world and how to invest in the opportunities that the real world is bringing. So, I see that as a fruitful field for investing the way Alger has for 60 years.
